Thanks to a Roundabout Trustee

I am responding to your call out for inspiring stories of trusteeship. I work for Roundabout (registered charity 297491) the UK’s largest arts therapy charity, which has been supporting vulnerable children and adults throughout Greater London for the last 29 years. 

Here at Roundabout we are fortunate enough to have had a wonderful group of trustees supporting the charity's work right from its earliest beginnings. Our current dedicated trustees Alison Kelly, Paul Girbow, Mark Stanley, Roger Winn, Bronwen Lord and Yvonne Winter have collectively supported Roundabout for over 64 years. They are all equally passionate about Roundabout and we appreciate everything they all do but I would like to tell you about how Mark Stanley supports Roundabout.

A year and a half ago Roundabout launched its new website, www.roundaboutdramatherapy.org.uk, designed as a generous gift by Ben Keen, a friend of the charity.  Since its launch Mark has had a pivotal role in updating and developing the website further. He provides the team with feedback, from Google analytics and ensures that team news, annual reports etc are updated speedily onto the website.

Mark has supported me in launching our Twitter feed (@roundaboutdrama) a year ago, including researching how to do this then sharing this with me and the Project Directors Lynn Cedar and Deborah Haythorne. When I am unable to tweet, Mark takes on this role including a fortnight of daily tweets this summer when I was on annual leave.

Mark has also researched and advised Roundabout on best value IT equipment.

As Roundabout only has funding to employ one WTE administrator and my post is only I day a week (with responsibility for Roundabout’s website/twitter/PR etc) Mark’s commitment and dedication has been a lifeline. I speak to Mark regularly and at great length as we troubleshoot the challenges of raising awareness of dramatherapy and fundraising amongst other things.

All of this of course, as with all trustees, is work carried out by Mark in his ‘free time’ for no payment. What makes Marks trusteeship even more inspiring is that Mark suffers long term chronic back pain which makes it impossible for him to stay in one position for more than a few minutes without the pain increasing. In recent years Mark has been unable to attend trustees meetings in person as the journey would cause him too much pain, instead he joins the meetings via Skype. At times Mark will need to divide a piece of work into several short bursts of work over a number of days but never lets this stop him from supporting Roundabout’s work.

We are very grateful to Mark and all our trustees past and present for being part of the Roundabout family.